Urban Gardening: Rise of a relatively new phenomenon

By Anamika Bahuguna

Turn your lawn into a small farm

Are you the new gardening enthusiasts and looking to grow vegetables, herbs, and fruits in the pot, terrace, rooftop, outside wall and city tower?  Are you fed up with the neck-breaking and fast-paced life and dream of having a healthy food and balanced lifestyle?

Here is the good news; you are just a few steps away to turn your lawn into a small farm. Now, you can grow food which will be closer to where you live. All you need is to adopt green solutions and efficient space savvy tactics in your residential, office, commercial spaces, and embrace this remarkable switch to transform your place. There are a plethora of available options, like vertical gardening, rooftop gardening, front yard orchards, and kitchen gardening. Initiatives like urban gardening have flourished in metro cities with the increase in the number of urban households who are growing vegetables, herbs, and fruits for everyday consumption. The unused space at your home or workplace can turn out to be productive by new innovative methods that will provide more green space, meanwhile, tackling the shortage of water also.

But it’s not a cakewalk as it seems like, one needs to have access to the proper guidance of subject matter experts to grow and maintain the plants. Entrepreneurs and farming companies have now started providing these services to urban people who are interested. IFFCO Kisan, for instance, is serving similar kinds of services to the urban population through its expert services by providing them a customized solution as per their requirements. It creates a platform for both individuals and communities to grow healthy, consumable crops within their premises and promote sustainable urban farming. ‘IFFCO Kisan Urban Greens’ is a mobile application and web portal service for all gardening enthusiasts. One can also purchase different plants, seedlings through the portal/mobile app and can also post their problem, which would be attended by the experts.

With the growing air and soil pollution in the metro cities which have left people clueless and dubious about what they breathe or eat. This problem can be solved through urban gardening. It’s no longer required to live outside the city to grow the plants and nutritious veggies. Urban garden layouts are versatile enough to have your very –own balcony or rooftop garden.